Secondary Development Of 3D Dimensioning System Based On Pro/E

With the development of the 3D CAD technology, the 3D modeling technology play a more and more important role in product design process. But the 2D engineering drawing is still used widely in the manufacturing of the products. The ability of information expression of the 2D engineering drawing is less intuitive than it is in the 3D space. Also the 2D engineering drawing needs the engineers to have higher spatial imagination ability. This has seriously affected the rapid product design and manufacturing. Although the existing Pro/E software can realize the 3D annotation function. But the current 3D annotation function has some problems, such as complicated operation, complex interface and inconvenience use. For these problems, it is very necessary to re-develop the Pro/E to simplify the process, normalize the annotations so that it is convenient for the engineers to use.The development of the 3D dimensioning system mentioned in this paper is mainly about the re-development of the Pro/E using the Pro/TOOLKIT in Visual Studio 2008 platform. The Pro/TOOLKIT is a module provided by the Pro/E for users to re-develop the Pro/E. It provides a large number of C language library functions for developers. This paper not only gives a detail description about the Pro/TOOLKIT, but also describes the configuration in Visual Studio 2008 and some matters needing attention.According to the shortcomings existed in the Pro/E?s own 3D annotation system and the actual needs I set up the development target. According to the target of the system, I set up the design thought and basic strategy of the system and then give a feasibility analysis on the system realization. On the basis of the design thought and basic strategy of the system, I formulate a detail development process of the system and then start comprehensive development of the system in according with the several stages formulated in the development process of the system.It?s very normal to encounter many technical problems in the development process. For example, automatic selection of the annotation plane, obtaining of the direction of the feature, input of the special character, automatic determination of the tolerance. In thispaper, these common problems encountered in system development process are explained in detail. The solution is also given in this paper. According to the research of these key technologies, we can have a better understand about the re-development and 3D annotation. This can provide help for the system development so that we can develop a more excellent and efficient system.The key of the system development is how to simplify the existing process and interface of the Pro/E 3D annotation system. Simplifying the existing operation process can let the users who not often use the Pro/E learn how to use the 3D annotation more quickly. Improving the efficiency can make the annotation quickly be labeled in the right place in most cases. It saves lots of the users? time. Normalizing the annotations can make the annotations closer to the standard form. This will be convenient for the users to read the annotations and to obtain relevant information of the model.